Cry No More Read online

  Rip looked startled. “Whaddaya mean? You’re some kind of—I mean, you’re official?”

  Diaz ignored that. “Stay in a hotel. Don’t speak to your wife; you’re too emotional. Don’t spook her into running. If she runs, I’ll have to go after her.”

  Rip had seen what happened to someone Diaz went after, and he shuddered.

  Diaz ignored him after that, putting Milla in the passenger seat of her SUV and then driving off without speaking again. Rip stared after them for a moment, then shuddered again. He got behind the wheel of his car and sat there for a minute, different scenarios running through his mind and none of them pleasant. He thought of Susanna. Then he bowed his head against the steering wheel and cried.

  There was such a storm of emotions roiling through Milla that she couldn’t pin one down long enough to examine it. There were both relief and regret, triumph and sorrow, shame and grim satisfaction. She leaned her head back and watched the streetlights loom and then recede in a dizzying parade. The dash clock said the time was only eleven P.M.; she had thought surely it was almost dawn.

  Tonight she had seen in action what she’d always sensed about Diaz, from the very first moment he’d knocked her down and threatened to snap her neck. The destruction he was capable of was truly frightening—and yet she wasn’t frightened. He had taken those aspects of his own character and molded them into a weapon to be used against the enemy, the dregs of society who ignored its laws and wreaked their own destruction. He won by being even more brutal, even more ruthless. What he didn’t do was turn that force against those he perceived as innocent. Ever. She felt safer with him than she’d have felt sitting in the middle of a police station.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “Helping me.” She didn’t know if she could have finished it without him. When Pavón started spewing his poison, Diaz had simply put his hand over Milla’s and together they’d pulled the trigger; his hand had steadied hers, his finger had added its strength to hers. She was ashamed that she hadn’t been able to do it herself, and yet so relieved that she hadn’t had to.

  “You’d have done it,” he said with cool confidence. “I just didn’t want you to hear any more of what the bastard had to say.”

  “Do you think he was lying?” She squeezed her eyes together, because his filthy words had spread cold horror through her heart.

  “He didn’t know what happened to any of the babies; he just wanted to say something to hurt you.”

  And he’d succeeded, all too well.

  They reached her home and a touch of a button raised the garage door; he slotted the Toyota inside before the door had finished lifting, and had it lowered again almost before Milla could get out of her seat belt and open the door. She dug out her keys and unlocked the door from the garage into the kitchen, stepping inside and turning on the lights.

  He whirled her against the refrigerator, his hands hard on her waist. Startled, she dropped her purse and keys to the floor and looked up at his set face and narrowed savage eyes. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” he said with clenched teeth.

  She didn’t have to ask what he meant. Those moments when Pavón’s pistol had been trained directly at her head had been long and terrifying.

  “I stayed in the—” she began, but he cut her off with a kiss that was wild and hungry and deep. He lifted her onto her toes and pressed in hard against her, grinding his erection into the softness of her mound. She yielded immediately to that outraged male aggression, wrapping her arms around him and transforming it into sheer lust. He moved one hand to the waistband of her jeans and unsnapped them, dragged down the zipper, then thrust his hand inside her panties and curled his fingers up into her while his palm rode her clitoris. She bucked under the lash of abrupt desire, growing wet around his fingers, hugging them with her body.

  He took her there, shucking her out of her jeans and dropping his own, then bending her over the kitchen table. Milla clutched the edge of the table to brace herself against his hard thrusts, pushing back to take all of him. He reached around and under to fondle her, his talented fingers wringing a fast orgasm from her. Then he simply gripped her hips and pumped into her until he began coming, slumping over her as he jerked and thrust. He shuddered with completion, his mouth hot on the back of her neck. “God,” he muttered indistinctly, “when I saw him with that pistol in your face—”

  “I had one in his, too.”

  “Would that make you any less dead if he’d pulled the trigger?” He bit her shoulder, then gently pulled out of her and turned her around. He buried his fingers in her hair, holding her head as he sank into a kiss as hungry and devouring as if they hadn’t just made love. She gripped his wrists and let that steely strength wrap around her, soaking it up and using it to bolster her own. There was so much still to be done . . . tomorrow. She would spend the rest of the night just being with her lover.

  Tomorrow she would go to New Mexico. Only part of her mission had been accomplished. She still had to find her son.

  24

  In the night, while she drowsed with her head on his shoulder and one arm draped across his stomach, he said absently, “I think I should tell you something.”

  She woke enough to murmur, “What?”

  “True’s my half brother.”

  She sat straight up in bed. “What?”

  “Get back down here,” he said, tugging her down into place once more on his shoulder.

  “Neither of you go out of your way to broadcast the relationship, do you?” she demanded sarcastically.

  “He hates my guts and I hate his. That’s the relationship.”

  “So he knew exactly who you were and where to find you when I first asked!”

  “No. He’s never known where to find me.”

  Wow. They were really close, weren’t they? “You have the same mother, obviously.”

  “Had. She’s dead. But, yeah. He was around five, I guess, when she left him and her husband and went to Mexico with my father. She had me, she left my father, she found another guy.”

  “But she took you with her when she left him.”

  “For a while, until I was about ten. Then she sent me to live with him. I doubt they were ever married, and now that I think of it, unless True’s father divorced her before I was born, my last name might legally be Gallagher.” He sounded only mildly interested, and she knew he’d never go to the trouble of looking up the legal documents to find out.

  “Why does he hate you? Does he even know you?”

  “We’ve met,” he said briefly. “As for hating me, his mother left him for my father. Then when she left my father, she took me along. She didn’t take True when she left his father. Old-fashioned resentment, I guess. And I’m half Mexican. He hates Mexicans, period.”

  She had never picked up on any prejudice from True, but that would be something he kept hidden, wouldn’t it? Especially in El Paso. He was a man intent on climbing as high as he could go, and it wasn’t smart to offend the people who would help him along the way.

  “What happens now? Shouldn’t you tell whoever you deal with”—she waved a hand to indicate the universe—“about Susanna and True?”

  “I did that as soon as I talked to Enrique Guerrero. They’re being watched to make certain they don’t try to leave the country. As for gathering the hard evidence, I leave that to the other guys. They have the crime labs, the forensics experts. Normally I just find people for them; I don’t get involved in the crime solving.”

  She felt flat. Perhaps she’d watched too many crime dramas on television, but she wanted a big showdown, with violence and a full confession and True being led away in handcuffs. Played out this way, she wouldn’t even get to ask him the question that burned in her mind: Why? She couldn’t go near him now, not without tipping him off, because there was no way she could act normally around him, and she probably wouldn’t be allowed to see him later.

  She didn’t care about his confession, abo